Marya Quotes

“Time is the element in which we exist... We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Marya

“Great handfuls of her life were being stolen from her and she would never be able to retrieve them.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Marya: A Life: A Life: An American Gothic Coming-of-Age Novel – 20th Century Literary Trauma and Reinvention

“These were no-man's-lands, limbos of a sort, places where language did not prevail and the only protection was flight, if you could run fast enough; or submission if you couldn't.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Marya

“A familiar story, Marya instructs herself—a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn’t a soul of her own.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Marya: A Life: A Life: An American Gothic Coming-of-Age Novel – 20th Century Literary Trauma and Reinvention

“Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely—Hamlet whispered truths too cruel to be borne, every word in Lear hooked in flesh and could not be dislodged. As for Wilde, Hobbes, Schopenhauer . . . even cynicism, Marya saw, can’t save you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Marya: A Life: A Life: An American Gothic Coming-of-Age Novel – 20th Century Literary Trauma and Reinvention